Authors Like Kate Quinn

Robert Graves

British · Good-Bye to All That (1929), I, Claudius (1934)

Graves was born in Wimbledon in 1895 and was badly wounded at the Somme in 1916; Good-Bye to All That is his memoir of the First World War. I, Claudius and its sequel Claudius the God (1935) are told by the stammering emperor himself, looking back on the poisonings and plots of the Julio-Claudian court. The novels became a BBC television series in 1976.

Kristin Hannah

American · The Nightingale (2015), The Women (2024)

Hannah was born in Garden Grove, California, in 1960 and practised law before she wrote fiction. The Nightingale follows two French sisters under German occupation: Vianne, who stays to protect her home and child, and Isabelle, who joins the Resistance and guides downed airmen over the Pyrenees. The Women follows Frankie McGrath, an army nurse in Vietnam, and what happens when she comes home.

Every book by Kristin Hannah →

Martha Hall Kelly

American · Lilac Girls (2016), Lost Roses (2019)

Lilac Girls, Kelly’s first novel, grew out of her research into Caroline Ferriday, a New York philanthropist who helped Polish survivors of Ravensbrück concentration camp. It braids Ferriday’s story with those of a Polish prisoner and a German camp doctor. Lost Roses follows Ferriday’s mother, Eliza, through the years of the Russian Revolution.

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Kate Atkinson

British · Life After Life (2013), Transcription (2018)

Atkinson was born in York in 1951; her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995), won the Whitbread Book of the Year. Life After Life lets Ursula Todd die and begin again, over and over, through two world wars. Transcription follows Juliet Armstrong, recruited by MI5 at eighteen in 1940 to type up the secretly recorded conversations of British fascist sympathisers.

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Sarah Waters

Welsh · Fingersmith (2002), The Night Watch (2006)

Waters was born in Neath, Wales, in 1966 and wrote a doctoral thesis on lesbian and gay historical fiction before her first novel. The Night Watch follows four Londoners from 1947 back to 1941, through ambulance driving, prison and the Blitz. Both it and Fingersmith, a Victorian crime novel, were shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

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Ruta Sepetys

American · Between Shades of Gray (2011), Salt to the Sea (2016)

Sepetys grew up in Michigan, the daughter of a Lithuanian refugee. Between Shades of Gray follows a Lithuanian girl deported to Siberia by Soviet forces in 1941. Salt to the Sea, told by four young refugees, ends with the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945, the deadliest disaster in maritime history; it won the Carnegie Medal in 2017.

Janie Chang

Canadian, born in Taiwan · The Library of Legends (2020), The Porcelain Moon (2023)

Chang was born in Taiwan, has lived in the Philippines, Iran, Thailand and New Zealand, and now lives in British Columbia. She wrote The Phoenix Crown (2024) with Quinn. The Library of Legends follows university students fleeing Japanese bombing in 1937 with a precious collection of myths; The Porcelain Moon is set in France in 1918, among the Chinese Labour Corps.

Erin Morgenstern

American · The Night Circus (2011), The Starless Sea (2019)

Morgenstern’s first novel, The Night Circus, is set in a black-and-white circus that opens only at night and hides a contest between two young magicians. The Starless Sea begins when a graduate student, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, finds a library book that contains a scene from his own childhood, and follows him into a hidden world of stories underground.

Ben Macintyre

British · Operation Mincemeat (2010), Agent Sonya (2020)

Macintyre, a columnist for The Times, writes narrative histories of espionage from declassified files. Operation Mincemeat tells how British intelligence floated a dead man carrying fake plans off the coast of Spain in 1943 to mislead the Germans about the invasion of Sicily. Agent Sonya follows Ursula Kuczynski, a Soviet spy who passed atomic secrets to Moscow from a village in the Cotswolds.

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Pat Barker

British · Regeneration (1991), The Silence of the Girls (2018)

Barker was born in Thornaby-on-Tees in 1943. Her Regeneration trilogy, set among shell-shocked officers at Craiglockhart War Hospital, ended with The Ghost Road, which won the Booker Prize in 1995. The Silence of the Girls retells the Iliad through Briseis, a queen given to Achilles as a prize of war.